March 4 Open Thread

Three cheers for new upgrades for bikes on 2nd Ave. I still think people pretending to be confused about what the bike symbol on the stop light means when the last round came out were pretty awful. So I can’t wait for further dipshitatude.

Still, I hardly ever use 2nd. I see a lot more people on it than it used to have. Still, even though I’ve seen it, used it, and written about it, in a part of my mind, it’s still a 1 way, unprotected thing that drivers don’t use. I know this is wrong, but it still prevents some use from me. Also, I’m walking more than biking nowadays, but that’s neither here nor there.

This Open Thread is more rambling and half-formed than usual. Talk about whatever.

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Carl, I think you’re being too hard on drivers, especially older ones. I understand the frustration of cyclists with drivers who make mistakes or don’t understand the rules. (But I wish more cyclists appreciated the frustration of drivers with cyclists who don’t obey the rules.) The fact is, in dense and fast-changing traffic, drivers don’t have time to think, only react, and it takes time to get used to new signs, signals, and symbols. When driving on streets you’ve used for a long time, and taking familiar routes, major structural changes to those routes (such as converting car lanes to bike lanes) take time to adjust to. So be patient, Carl. And try to survive the drivers’ adjustment period. It’s going to take some of them a couple years to get used to the new lights. Meantime, your challenge is to stay alive.

Nonfarm payrolls are 50k higher than expected. Oil is up to $35.00. Gold is up to $1275. A Fed guy is talking about higher interest rates. The Dow is +50 points. None of this bodes well for mattress stuffers waiting for markets to crash. But at least $100,000 in a bank account may soon be earning $250 a year instead of $100 a year. Wink-wink.

While Puffybutt earns $15 a year of interest on his life savings, my stocks are up another $1,500 today, and roughly $35,000 or $40,000 since the market bottomed in late January or early February. Looking back, it sure does look like it turned then, although it was impossible to know that at the time. Always is. No wonder he’s a wage slave and I’m not. Mattress investing is for dummies. Nobody can “time” markets, least of all us. If the big firms with their supercomputers, research departments, and whiz kids can’t do it, then it makes sense that we can’t either. All you can do is stay invested all the time, keep collecting the dividends, and use the cash to pick up more shares when the big guys and leveraged guys and robot traders are unloading them cheap.

Oops! In the 8 minutes it took me to type @2 my stocks jumped some more and now are up $2,500 this morning. Very unpredictable. I can’t guess these things; I just sit here and watch it happen. I guess the nice thing about mattress investing, if there is one, is it’s very predictable. Puffy knows exactly how much he’ll make from his savings this year. Don’t spend it all at Starbucks, Puffy! You should put some of it back into your bank account so you can compound your interest income at the munificent rate of 1/10th of 1 percent a year!

I’m going to call bullshit on the OJ knife story. You heard it here first.

The OJ investigation and trial was part of my work at the time. I know a lot. Yes he did it. Wait for the search warrant, don’t hop his fence.

The LAPD was at the estate for nearly a week with metal detectors because they were worried that Furman et al had made a lot of evidence inadmissible by entering OJs property which was not the home of the victim and they knew it without a warrant. Pretty much everything found in the hours between the murders and a warrant was toast. They needed the knife.

There is no way in the light of day after they had a warrant they missed a freshly dug spot on the grounds. There is no way metal detectors, days and days of detecting, didn’t find it. It is not possible that the knife is on the estate and LAPD failed to find it. I suppose it is possible that someone who had the knife off the property the whole time (I’m lookin’ at you Kato) buried it there after the LAPD was done but that strains imagination as the same person could have gone to Redondo, or Oceanside or San Diego or Santa Barbara and dropped it off a pier or taken the Catalina boat and dropped it in the deep ocean somewhere in between. They could have buried it in Griffith park or Joshua Tree or Palmdale or any number of places an hour drive from Brentwood that are uninhabited. Take 50 paces off a trail, dig small hole, cover. Gone forever.

I suggest this retiring officer is getting his fifteen minutes. I don’t buy any part of the story of a construction worker calling his friend the LAPD officer and telling no one else when they found a knife at OJs house. In this era of reality TV fame that just wouldn’t happen.

@8 Frankly, I think it could be laying on the lawn, the cops could step on it, and they’d never find it. Yes, L.A. cops are that dumb. Search warrant? What search warrant? We don’t need no frikken search warrant! We’re the police!

I actually think the jury got it right. There was reasonable doubt for lots of things.

I essentially watched every minute of the trail and OJs team first off found 12 people plus alternates who lived in some universe where news, cable TV and pop culture awareness didn’t exist. Then they racked up enough, maybe the cops are wrong points.

I was telling people at the time, if I were a pretty not aware juror who didn’t know what was in the upstairs shower (inadmissible) and the foyer (inadmissible) and the driveway (inadmissible) I would probably not be willing to lock him up for life on the evidence they have.

@12 If I had an expensive pair of skin tight, fine leather gloves and soaked them in blood, rinsed them in water, dried them out, put on a pair of rubber gloves and tried to put the dried leather pair over them, I doubt they would fit. I sat on a jury once where a woman identified a man who sexually assaulted her. On her initial police report she described him as having a scruffy beard. When he came to court, he was clean shaven and the jury let him off (not me) because that fact alone presented “reasonable” doubt. Disgusting nonsense.

Any kid who has played little league, anyone who has owned a leather coat, anyone who has ever had leather yard gloves knows what happens to wet leather.

Everyone apparently except the L.A. DAs office. Don’t have him try on the gloves. You should know they won’t fit. If his defense has him try on the gloves, have a rebuttal witness at the ready who can scientifically describe how many sizes a soaked pair of those exact brand and year of gloves will shrink. but for the love of GOD, don’t tell the jury,This is OJs glove and then have him PUT ON THE SHRUNKEN GLOVES AND SHOW THE JURY THEY DON’T FIT.

Show the pictures of him sideline reporting wearing the same gloves, show the gloves are soaked in blood and they are the same as the ones in the picture then move on. Don’t let him put on the shrunken gloves by your own choice! What’s wrong with you?!?

But to let them not fit and then have that bit of doubt hang there and wait til closing arguments to say, “well they shrunk….” Morons. All of you. Morons.

The legal team had other things that made the case tough to not have reasonable doubt but man, the gloves.

Again, I’m saying this pretending I didn’t know all the other shit that was in the media and from LAPD off-the-record information that couldn’t be presented at trial. I get why they acquitted even though I know it was 100% wrong.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: This is what happens when police agencies hire bad cops who’ve been fired for misconduct or incompetence. Why do they? Expediency. Because it saves training costs and those hires can be put on duty immediately. But that’s not a good enough reason to keep putting bad cops back on the streets — or in our public schools.

Ben Carson is telling a conservative audience that it’s not the government’s job to “take care of the indigent.” This is the old shopworn rightwing argument that the poor should depend on private charity. Here’s what’s wrong with that:

(1) Only government has the resources to provide an adequate safety net in times of economic crisis.

(2) The needs of the desperately poor aren’t discretionary.

(3) Under an economic system like capitalism that chooses winners and losers, basic subsistence should be society’s obligation, not some person’s gift.

(4) Government treats everyone the same; private charities can discriminate against people they don’t like.

(5) Government doesn’t lecture the victims of market excesses that they’re moral failures.

So Ben, please stop alluding to the Bible and Constitution to justify your sanctimonious BS. They don’t say that.

@16 He’s a bloviating pus bag. You would think he’d figure out why nobody bought his bullshit. But, no, he just keeps puking it out, without facts, just because if he believes it, it must be true. Like his pyramid grain silo nonsense. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he ends up in prison some day. Tax evasion?

” … Donald Trump said Friday that he would not order the U.S. military to violate international laws to fight terrorism, a stark reversal from his statements at Thursday’s Republican debate. Trump said … he understands ‘that the United States is bound by laws and treaties’ and said he would ‘not order our military or other officials to violate those laws and will seek their advice on such matters.'”

Oh the delicious irony of the Right Wing media noise machine noticing that Fox News had their finger on the scales at a debate in which they were supposed to be a neutral moderator. Why it was almost like their network had an agenda.

Carl I think your admiration for bicycles, an alternative to and an opposition to gas guzzling steel boxes, is a great thing and is commendable. But I just got finished watching an episode of Vice on HBO about the depletion of water and wide waste of it in from poorly mismanaged agriculture and related beef industry. The documentary went into much greater detail of the reason and implication that are causing shortage and the eventual disappearance of potable water.

This loss of water doesn’t seem to me to be, or shouldn’t be, a partisan issue. But I’m sure partisans would fault the other party and not take any responsibility and or take any accountability in the problem that we face.

I don’t think this is a partisan issue – But I think that the people that ignore the problem of Future warter shortage or other environmental issues really are smarter than not believing it and that they just don’t want to deal with it because the issue is so big and too extreme to fix. Republucans have evolved, or started to evolve, to a point that they no longer deny that global warming exists but that there is nothing we can do or that it would be too costl to fix. Instead there way of dealing with it is to start to segregate themselves from the masses to protect themselves so that when resources dry up they are the few members that survive the longest.

After seeing this documentary, it seems to me like we are talking about a lot of issues in life that really pale in comparison as far as importance. All these other issues are just distractions and smoke screens that preoccupy from dealing with real issues that matter. But even small improvements like better bike lanes are good measures and small achievements, and achievements that are in the best interest of a sustainable earth

We are running low and out of water in this world and we are talking about penises.

@1 in the meantime your challenge is to stay alive. That my apply I. A day to day timeframe but I don’t think anyone will survive in the long run without water, or a growing pot of invested money.

We need to be working on the real problems of the world. We aren’t looking at the big picture here, we are getting too caught up in the small stuff.

If anyone didn’t see the documentary, you should. It is a real eye opener. As someone of middle age and no kids, I’m not sure why anyone would want to give birth to any offspring, unless your just in it for the short term gratification and you really don’t care about your children or grand children after you die and look at it as if you don’t care because you will be dead.

@13 So he was supposed to don a fake scruffy beard? Isn’t there some concept in American law ummmm not having to testify against one self. Perhaps he had the inability to grow a scruffy beard. Prosecutors don’t loose that often still they have to actually prove their case except in front of a grand jury where the prosecutor can show a cheese sandwich shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll and has managed to hang together to commit this heinous crime. Could we also have a system where the guilty sometimes walk so the innocent are more likely to remain free?

@14 Perhaps the DA should have made sure what size gloves Mr Simpson wore and the original size of the gloves. Then had a new pair available in an unopened original package from the manufacturer? Do leather gloves shrink in blood though? How much blood is needed to shrink gloves? Even if you act the part of Aztec priest and cut out the victims heart and eat the heart with the gloves on is that enough blood to shrink them? Was the blood wet or dry when the gloves were found? Yes the Prosecutor may have royally screwed up, perhaps pushing the case way too soon was also a screw up. Then again just maybe the gloves were always too damned small, and they never got close to bringing the real murderer to justice.

@19 No President has ever asked American troops to do any of those things. None of those fictional Presidents on 24 ever did. Nothing like a war crime ever happened at Wounded Knee. All union prisoner of war camps during the Civil War were all 5 star accommodations. There was no butcher of New Orleans, Fire bombings of Tokyo and other cities and use of atomic Hiroshima and Nagasaki totally justified. The Castle Bravo test in1954 the right thing to do and no reason for a day of morning holiday on those atolls.

Meanwhile bike lovers move to Bellingham, WA and make this the bike capital of western Washington. Downtown is flatter than Seattles. Do have a few hills but nothing like Seattle so bikers come take over Bellingham!!! Our city council will even listen to you. And we have more and more bike shops. Also in the event of a Trump Presidency and you feel the need to escape to Canada you will be much much closer to the border to escape on your bike.

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